It’s been a long time since my last post. Lots of things had happened and I’ll use this post to get back on track. I usually don’t post anything about my private life, yet I consider important to mention that my girlfriend was visiting me at Waterloo. We don’t get to see each other very often so it was really great having her here for more than two months!

Now going back to Geeky stuff :-). I was traveling during December. First I went to visit Sebastian Maneth and Kim Nguyen at NICTA in Australia. We did work in our SXSI system (more on it in a following post), in particular, I did some experiments with the XBW and regular/naive tries for answering some specific queries on the system. For path searching both options were awesome, the second one was of course faster and sometimes bigger. The way we answer queries in the system doesn’t allow us to change exclusively to any of those two representations, but considering them as part of the index for answering specific queries could have been interesting. We didn’t make any final decision and the fact that the XBW is patented could complicate things a little bit. We expect to release a GPL version of SXSI and we would like people to be able to use it without any restriction.

After two weeks in Sydney I went back to Chile. It was probably the worst flight ever. NICTA did pay for my trip to Australia, so I had to come back to Canada. I came back, spent 12 hours in the airport and then took a really bad combination through Miami. The total time since I left Australia till I got to Chile was more than 50 hours. During that time ISAAC was taking place in Hawaii. I was coauthor in two papers accepted there: the untangling (with Diego Arroyuelo, Reza Dorrigiv, Stephane Durocher, Meng He, Alejandro López-Ortiz, J. Ian Munro, Patrick Nicholson, Alejandro Salinger, and Matthew Skala) and disc covering (with Reza Dorrigiv, Stephane Durocher, Robert Fraser, Alejandro López-Ortiz, and Alejandro Salinger). While Bob and Matthew were presenting them, I was attending Alejandro Salinger’s wedding (he is also coauthor in both papers :p). The wedding was great! I did really enjoy it, the planning was amazing and we had so much fun in it!

After a couple of weeks in Chile, on the 6th of January I came back to Waterloo. When I got here we started working on the untangling problem we “solved” in the ISAAC paper about range searching. We found a flaw in our algorithm and we spent a LOT of time correcting the method. We did submit a journal version of the paper (corrected). Patrick and I did implement the untangling algorithm and a simplified version of the range searching data structure (that’s were we found the problem). It works really well on real datasets and at this moment we are preparing an experimental paper including those results.

I also went to an Android Developer Lab and I got a Nexus One as a gift from Google! It was a really good experience (the lab, and of course the nexus too :-)). We did learn about implementing software for android. I’ve played a little bit with it and so far I’m impressed with what a phone can do! (Yes, I used to have a phone that wouldn’t do more than calling.) I’m really tempted to test the range searching data structure on the phone and compare it with other data structures. It’s one of the scenarios we were thinking of when designing our structure.

We also got some good news about two other papers. One about compact web graph representations in Esko Ukkonen Festschrift with Gonzalo Navarro, and one about indexing repetitive sequences in BIBE 2010 (with Antonio Farina, Miguel A. Martinez-Prieto and Gonzalo Navarro), where we got to see how the SLP index works in practice.

The last thing remaining to tell: We also got a paper about succinct binary relations accepted into LATIN (with Jeremy Barbay and Gonzalo Navarro), I’ll be going there in April :-).

I guess that’s a good summary of what happened in the last couple of months =). There are some other things I want to write about but I’ll start doing so during the next week. That way I’ll be able to keep posting and not let the blog sleep for so long again :-).

One Comment

It was a good summary!!1
A really nice gesture, and I still don’t believe..thank u!!. You REALLY surprised me!! . I also had a great time with u… and I am looking forward to see u again!!
I love you!!
so much ♥

ps: terrible to travel 50 hours… =S .. hopefully won’t happen to u again
ps2: about all your work… u know I understand half of it, but but I know everything will work out just fine, because to me, u are the best ;)